A few months back, we talked you through your options for two different upcoming 90's nostalgia cruises, one held by Summerland ringleader Mark McGrath, and the other with just... Matchbox 20. Well, things move fast, cruises have been getting some shitty (ha!) PR, and all of that advice is now moot.

• This is you and your friends, probably.

Drinking and music go together like, I don't know, two things that go together really well, in a really sloppy, perfect kind of way. They just fit. If you've never belted out a song while holding a bottle of something in your hand, extended arm wobbling and sloshing the contents to the floor, well, I don't know that you can say you've really lived. But what makes a perfect drinking song? Well, it helps if it references alcohol, although any kind of intoxication will do, be it alcohol, drugs, or even love. It helps if it's easily identifiable from its opening bars, so that you can prepare yourself to sing along. It helps if the chorus is repeated enough that, even if you forget most of the lyrics, you can chime in a few times over the course of the song. It helps if it's particularly gleeful or particularly poignant, anything that makes you feel. These are songs that will make you cry into your glass and jump up off your bar stool. These are songs that will make you grab the person next to you and insist that they sing along. These are songs that you will dance to, because you just can't help it, you need to dance. These are the songs that, just when you're sure that the alcohol has dulled your brain past the point of cognizance, bring you back again, so that you can start all over. You can start everything all over.

The thing most seared into my brain about Kriss Kross is the heavy rotation commercial they did for Sprite in 1993. I don't mean to diminish the duo by saying that. They were actually fine rappers in retrospect, especially given all the "Lil' " kid rappers that came along in their wake. But I know every word of that ad. I remember feeling like I was having a stroke in the middle of a work day a few years ago when, triggered by nothing, it came flooding back to me starting with "Tick tock you don't stop, you put a can in your hand and just pop the top..." and running complete to the end. I wasn't even drinking soda!

I'm guessing I saw it most on Fox, which in its pre-American Idol adolescence had a more focused appeal to young and minority viewers. I definitely saw it a billion times on breaks during The Simpsons and In Living Color. It was an incidental, yet really significant sign that hip-hop had taken over the mantle of commercial youth music, even in the midst of rock n' roll's supposed last great moment of wider significance. I don't want to trick anyone into thinking a lemon-lime soda jingle is high art, because it makes me sorta sad and nostalgic. But I've seen hundreds of rap-themed commercials since then, and I can't remember any of them.

Watch it below, start singing along after word one...

• Your money, definitely not going to fancy scarves.

The flaws of his first movie have been detailed at length and a lot, because that's what the Internet is for. This Videogum takedown from 2011 feels pretty definitive. Salient sentence: "Here’s the thing: just because you use carefully selected songs to evince a particular mood, if everything else going on is absolute garbage then you are being a lazy fucking liar and I hate you." But even that devastating little splash of acid goes out of its way to give credit to the soundtrack for being effective. Braff definitely gets its huge part in making the movie a success, and one of the main Kickstarter premiums he offers is a sneak peak of the new one. So, what's gonna be on it??? Let's speculate wildly!

For decades, France’s biggest influence on American alternative culture was in film and fashion, an impossibly stylish people who needed to be seen to be appreciated. Lately, the country is dominating our ears. In 2013, the two sharpest focus moments from the whizzing blur that is the Coachella Festival were Phoenix’s on-stage duet with R&B superstar R. Kelly and Daft Punk revealing a fricking commercial for their new record Random Access Memory. Headline status for hedonistic Parisian pop was slow in coming, though. Some Serge Gainsbourg cultists among early-90s slacker collagists aside, French music wasn’t very ubiquitous until Daft Punk creeped into MTV rotation, clothing boutique speakers, and college dorm rooms at the end of the 90s along with original chill bros, AIR. Phoenix, linked closely to both bands, rose even slower as a rock band who rocked much softer than dance and pop acts. While these bands’ embrace of discarded sounds and styles that had been derided for decades now seems prescient, it took a good long while for it to become clear.

Below, check out a few places to go and a few things to search for when you are there. (Those not willing to take our suggestions can find a complete list of RSD exclusives here, and a more thorough list of participating local shops here).

Her band, original Williamsburg gentrification totems Yeah Yeah Yeahs, released their fourth album Mosquito yesterday. It's a record that strains at its own edges in that same unpurposed way, grabbing bits of anything—gospel choirs, found sounds, ill-fitting rap cameos—and just blindly mashing them in. A record as a Cold Stone Creamery cup. It's actually their first album that fully sounds like Karen O looks on stage. It's a pretty exciting mess!

In the RS interview, the guys talk about wanting to return to the quaint glamor of billboard ads and TV spots for upcoming records. But they fail to mention that they wouldn't be allowed to do that if all of their plans didn't also slot perfectly into a news-hungry Internet culture that's handing them all the real, valuable social network-shared advertising they really need. What's the point of debuting their record in the middle of an Australian farm convention? It's weird! People will write about it! Not that some farmers who probably don't care will somehow feel their slick disco music more authentically. The videos they've been rolling out through Vice's Creator's Project to spotlight the album's illustrious collaborators are even more aggressively modern in a way the guys pretend to reject.

It's become common acceptance that New York City is overrun by bands. Bands are everywhere. So many bands. A lot of them are really awful, let's not kid ourselves here. But there's a solid army of them keeping this place afloat as one of the creative centers of the universe—and that takes more than just eight bands. With that we'd like to tip our hat to a few honorable mentions wholly deserving of your attention.

For a band so obviously informed by rootsy 60s guitar rock (Neil Young lite?), Icewater's most potent weapon stretches surprisingly skyward. Ever-reaching vocals, scrubbed clean of grit and and the weariness of age, unfurl across rolling Fleet Fox melodies to turn songs into gentle anthems. They're currently recording a full-length; we suspect listening to it will make you look out windows and think about important things.

• Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Connie Lungpin...

I interviewed Cox once, right around the release of his first solo Atlas Sound record. As he is an extremely intelligent, extremely talkative guy, I feel like we covered a good chunk of rock history. Asked about the distinct personas of different Bowie eras, he made a really good, under-made point that they had been brought on by personal changes in band, geography, and producer just as much as they were a product of divine theatrical impulse. But he'd never do that. To quote: "I totally respect that, but it's not where I feel comfortable. I would feel really pretentious trying to do a Bowie thing. And I don't think it's very necessary." Cox has been playing with his image for a long while, now, but this is his first dive into a distinctly named stage persona. Ch-ch-changes.

Watch Lungpin sing "Monomania" with Deerhunter below: